She walked slowly round the sitting room, touching things. There were, it was true, a lot of things to touch. It was a large room, with large windows, and it was filled to bursting with stuff. Things that Grace Westmacott had brought back with her from her frequent travels with her husband, the minor diplomat, who had been sent, it seemed, to just about every flea-bitten outpost of the Empire. And everywhere they went, they brought back stuff. There were African masks and wooden sculptures; there were wooden chests from Southeast Asia that smelt of camphor when you opened them; there were clocks and mirrors, and there were whole tribes of totally useless gewgaws, scrimshaw, and what-nots. In particular, there were lots and lots of Benares brass knickknacks: trays and bowls and boxes and long-spouted coffeepots and a huge brass ashtray standing on a pedestal with a massively heavy base. God knows why they’d brought that back, because the Westmacotts had never smoked, to her certain knowledge.
And the photographs! There seemed to be hundreds of them, all featuring Mr. Westmacott, small, stern, bespectacled, and severely moustachioed, in various tropical garbs, but always with Grace, large and sternly imperial at his side, and usually surrounded by hordes of Indians, Chinese, Southeast Asians, and lots and lots of Africans of assorted persuasions, including, she noticed, a bunch of Pygmies.
When Grace Westmacott had first brought Madge into this cluttered room for their first and only interview, she had almost had an attack of claustrophobia, there was so much stuff. It was strange, because the house itself was in the middle of nowhere, miles from the nearest village. Madge had a hell of a time getting a taxi to bring her out here, along all the flooded country lanes, through all the sodden fields with just the occasional dripping cow for interest. And out of all that empty, damp nowhere, you came into what looked like a museum of the Third World.
But then she had come to like it. It was comforting, all this dark solidity. It made her think of her grandmother’s house. Madge’s grandmother had had a room very much like this one. Even to the dark, heavy, velvet curtains over the great windows and another on a curtain rail over the door to keep out the draughts. And a big fireplace. It was very agreeable sitting in there, sipping a glass of sherry and chatting.
Grace had employed Madge on the spot, without even taking up any of the references she had brought along. She appeared to like Madge. Perhaps that was because they were both tall, about the same size, and with the same sort of calm features. Grace clearly felt comfortable having an echo of herself around the place, dancing attendance.
At the end of the interview, Madge had thought, for a pleasant few minutes, that this was somewhere she could settle down and take things easy. After thirty years of nursing ungrateful old biddies and being paid a pittance for her trouble, having sacrificed her own chances for a home and a husband and family of her own, perhaps at last this was somewhere she could duck down behind the parapet, wait it out, go on building her tiny savings until her pension was due, and then — well, then she’d see.
For some euphoric moments, she had allowed herself to imagine cosy evenings in this room in front of a roaring log fire, with Grace Westmacott doing tapestry and herself reading something pleasant and improving.
But Grace had soon made it clear that this room was not for her. A housekeeper and paid companion, which is what she had advertised for, was just what the name implied, and not a bosom buddy. Madge’s domain was to be at the top of the house, a tiny bedroom coupled with what Grace Westmacott was pleased to call a sitting room, but which was actually little better than a box room. And which was connected by an ancient and intricate system of bells to Grace’s bedroom, the sitting room, the kitchen — everywhere, in fact, so that Grace could summon Madge at any hour of the day or night when she had a malaise.
It turned out that Grace had lots of malaises, and what she needed was not so much a paid companion but an insomniac army of major-domos, footmen, servants, nurses, and dogsbodies. She would call from her bedroom at four o’clock in the morning when she couldn’t sleep and needed a warm milky drink and her drops. She would call from the sitting room just as Madge was settling down to watch her tiny television, to ask her to find her tapestry, which was sitting right there three feet away from her on the sideboard, goddammit. She would call at any time on any whim, and after two or three months of this, Madge began to think she would chuck it in because Grace Westmacott was a pain in the bum.
But then one day while trudging up to the bedroom at ten in the morning with Grace’s breakfast, she thought of the drops. Grace was under doctor’s orders and the doctor had prescribed medicine to keep her calm — and, she suspected, to keep her from pestering the doctor. The medicine was in the form of drops to be taken in warm water. Every morning, after she had taken away the breakfast things, Madge had to re-uptrudge with the tray carrying a glass of warmed water, the little bottle, and a spoon.
While Grace, the great lump, lay in her peignoir on the bed, Madge would drip the prescribed number of drops into the glass and stir it. Grace would take it with a weary sigh, down it, and that was that.
The next morning, very daringly, Madge had doubled the dose. And to her delight, Grace had kept to her room all day, only leaving it to visit the bathroom. Madge had spent the whole of that wonderful, secret day in the forbidden sitting room, sitting on the sofas, looking out of the windows, even taking a dangerous glass of sherry. But she needn’t have worried. Grace hadn’t emerged until the next day, wearing a slightly puzzled air as though she wasn’t quite sure who she was. And then Madge knew she had the answer. Of course, she didn’t dare double the dose every day to begin with; God knew what was in the stuff. Every other day would be enough.
But two days after that, she did it again. And again Grace stayed up there in her room. Madge had looked in halfway through the day, ostensibly to ask about lunch, but Grace was lying on her back, staring at the ceiling, and clearly didn’t want to be bothered with lunch. So Madge had spent a fruitful day wandering round the house, and especially examining the contents of the large bureau in what she supposed the late Mr. Westmacott had called his study. There she found out everything she needed to know. And in the evening she sat in front of a roaring log fire in the sitting room and did a little planning. There was very little to plan, actually. Because, in fact, hardly anybody came to the house. Grace Westmacott seemed to be almost completely alone in the world.
There were deliverymen, of course, who brought the groceries, oil for the central heating; there were the men who came to read the meters and so on, but she already knew them and they never came in the house.
There was the doctor, but on his last visit he had made it clear, just by the way he spoke, that he was sick to death of Grace Westmacott.
The only real potential spoke in the wheel was the firm of solicitors who guarded and watched over the tiny trust account which Grace lived on. But they were far away in London. All they did was pay the household bills that Grace sent to them, and transfer a monthly sum into her current account at Lloyd’s Bank in Welding. At the end of each financial year, they sent an account of income from investments and property and disbursements, together with the current total of the Westmacott fortune, which, Madge remarked, was hardly substantial. It was enough to maintain Grace and the house, but there was no room for frivolous overspending. Mr. Westmacott seemed to have brought home a lot of native artifacts from his travels, but not much bacon.